A blog about learning and teaching Japanese, walking Japan, and sometimes about kit-kats.

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Near Kumadani-ji, temple number 8, we had stopped in front of some glorious cherry blossom, and I got chatting to two older gentlemen who were walking the trail. One told me he had never spoken to a gaijin-san, foreigner, before.

(The cynic in me wonders if that’s really true, or if by “foreigner” he meant “white person”…)

We took some pictures in front of the cherry blossom, and walked up the hill together.

Further up the road, a lady came out of her house and gave us some hard-boiled sweets ...

The first time I heard of rakugo I was at the weekly Japanese conversation club at MER Cafe in Nagoya in 2011, and the teacher / awesome boss lady Akiko-sensei was telling me about an event they were holding the following week.

"This man Sunshine-san is very famous," she told me. "He does traditional Japanese comic storytelling in English."

"Pfft," I thought to myself. "I don't want to see a show in English. I didn't come to Japan to watch stuff in English!"

Well, six years later I saw that same show right here in Brighton, and boy was I wrong.

Akiko wasn't lying when she told me that Katsura Sunshine is famous. He's the first ever western storyteller in the history of the “Kamigata” Rakugo tradition, and the second western Rakugo performer ever in the history of Japan.

A post shared by Sunshine Rakugo (@katsurasunshine) on May 7, 2017 at 3:47am PDT

We went last Sunday, the last night Sunshine was playing at the Brighton Fringe. There were thirteen of us and the theatre was super tiny, so we took up about half the seats.

I needn't have worried about the show being in English - the subject matter is basically all Japan! And there were plenty of jokes about the complexity of the Japanese language, and the entertaining perils of being abroad in Japan. That got a lot of laughs from our group...

A lot of the stories (dialogue etc.) is actually left untranslated from Japanese, which is great I think. You can pick up some Japanese words from context, but the show makes sense even if you don't speak Japanese.

The first half of the show was kind of like stand up (except of course he's sitting down) and the second half is storytelling. It was way more fast-paced than I expected.

↓ Post-rakugo pint

I should probably have gone and seen him in Nagoya six years ago...but I'm glad I got a second chance!

Did you know that Japan has its own numbering system for the years? As well as the Gregorian calendar (the same calendar used in the west, the one that says it's 2019 now), Japan uses another system which names years after the reign of the emperor.

(The western calendar is commonly used too - and the two systems can be used interchangeably.)

Many people believe you need to live abroad to get speaking practice in a foreign language, but this isn’t true.

Similarly, people often assume that if you in Japan, like I did, you’ll pick up the language easily. But that’s not necessarily true either.

If you speak English, it’s possible - indeed easy - to live in another country for years and not become fluent in the language.

I didn't make any year-long New Years’ Resolutions this year. Instead, I decided to set myself some monthly language-related challenges. I’ll decide them as the year goes on, and I’ll probably do one every other month.

I’m not a particularly loud person, but some parts of my Japanese classes are quite loud. We sing and dance, talk and play games. We’ve even been asked to keep the noise down before by a group in the next room who were having a meeting (sorry about that!)

But in summer 2018, I ran a very quiet course. Students worked alone, in a comfortable silence.

And I was the teacher, but I mostly sat reading a hand-stapled book, looking up only to check that students were happily entertaining themselves.

Near Kumadani-ji, temple number 8, we had stopped in front of some glorious cherry blossom, and I got chatting to two older gentlemen who were walking the trail. One told me he had never spoken to a gaijin-san, foreigner, before.

(The cynic in me wonders if that’s really true, or if by “foreigner” he meant “white person”…)

We took some pictures in front of the cherry blossom, and walked up the hill together.

Further up the road, a lady came out of her house and gave us some hard-boiled sweets ...